It’s great that people are writing and sharing interviews. I think this is an improvement, since candidates are more engaged with the process. But for someone like me, this is overwhelming. I’m not sure I’ll have a chance to go through all of these, since this cycle’s voting period runs through my semester final exam period too.

I wonder how others may also feel overwhelmed with this information and whether it may put people off from voting. When I know there are detailed interviews available, I feel guilty to cast a vote without reading them, but I have to find time to block off reading 17 consecutive blog posts and then vote.

This is the problem scenario I wanted to share, but I wanted to ask… is there a way we could do this better? Is there a way we could make these elections more interactive? Once upon a time, we talked about doing social media interview hours (4-6 hours of blocked time) where people can ask questions using a hashtag, and candidates could answer directly on a social media platform. This also has flaws (what if someone does not have an account / does not want to make one?), but I wanted to give an example of something we talked about before.

What do you all think? How can we better engage the nominees with the Fedora Community? How can we make the election process more interactive or interesting?

I see two different issues raised here: making elections more interactive and having to sort through too many candiates.

I’d be against the social media proposal because it requires synchronous communication in a block of time for those who are on a particular medium. It’s not clear if getting people to ask more questions would solve any problem people are currently having with the elections. It doesn’t seem like it would solve your issue of needing to read 17 blog posts since you would need to read/follow 17 different threads as well.

Each of the posts is fairly short as well. Yes there are 17 but if we have 17 candidates we need to get information out about each one. I’m not sure how you would reduce that while still allowing people to make an informed choice.

I do think you have a point about interactivity, but that might be a “yes and” idea instead of a replacement.

I’d also add that most candidates would probably have no issue responding to
questions asked on IRC, email or on the devel mailing list. I’m pretty sure
some documentation actually says candidates will answer questions on the devel
list.

What do you all think? How can we better engage the nominees with the Fedora Community? How can we make the election process more interactive or interesting?

I would prefer shorter replies and a short CV with the most important facts of the candidates. The simultaneous posts to the blog cannot be avoided to make it fair. I did not use the blog to find the interviews because it is not a clean interface but used the links from the voting app to access the interviews in a more structured way.